Byredo

Ben Gorham was born in Stockholm in 1976 to an Indian mother and Canadian father, growing up between Stockholm, Toronto, and New York before a career as a professional basketball player was curtailed by injury. He discovered fragrance through a chance encounter with Italian-Japanese perfumer Pierre Wulff and decided to create a fragrance house with no perfumery background but extraordinary aesthetic conviction. Byredo launched in Stockholm in 2006 with its first fragrance, Pulp — a cassis-carrot-cedar composition that immediately attracted the fashion and art world's attention for its unusual, unconventional character. The brand's visual identity — simple bottles, restrained typography, minimal art direction — embodied the Scandinavian design philosophy that would prove influential across the luxury fragrance industry. EQT, Manzana Group, and ultimately Puig Group acquired controlling interest in 2022.

Byredo works with a small group of perfumers including Jerome Epinette (who created Gypsy Water and Bal d'Afrique) and Alexandra Carlin. Jerome Epinette is the house's most important creative collaborator, creating several of Byredo's most celebrated compositions. Gypsy Water (2008) uses bergamot, lemon, pepper, incense, pine needles, sandalwood, and amber to create a composition that smells simultaneously of a pine forest, a bohemian campfire, and Parisian rooftop. Bal d'Afrique (2009) uses bergamot, African marigold, cyclamen, neroli, cedar, vetiver, and musks to capture the spirit of 1920s Paris's African cultural exchange.

Gypsy Water (2008) is Byredo's most celebrated and commercially significant fragrance — a bergamot-pine-incense-sandalwood composition beloved by the fashion world for its simultaneously bohemian and polished character. It has been worn publicly by Beyoncé, Rihanna, and countless fashion editors. Bal d'Afrique (2009) is perhaps the more compositionally sophisticated — its African marigold and bergamot-neroli create something genuinely warm and cross-cultural. Mojave Ghost (2014) — ambrette, magnolia, violet, sandalwood, and ambergris — is the house's most 'skin scent' offering and often recommended as an entry point for those new to Byredo. La Tulipe (2012) and Rose of No Man's Land (2016) are beloved feminines.

Byredo occupies premium niche luxury — EDPs from €160-€220 for 100ml — with a cultural cache in the fashion world that few brands achieve. Their brand identity is so coherent that a Byredo fragrance on a shelf is recognised before it is smelled.

Every Byredo fragrance at The Scent Stories® is 100% authentic, factory-sealed and brand-packaged — sourced from authorised channels and shipped worldwide.